It’s official: healthcare and life sciences (HLS) marketing has gone digital. Healthcare Professionals just aren’t taking visits from sales reps the way they used to, and most of them now prefer to be approached through digital channels. While personal relationships are still essential to sales success in the HLS space, companies that don’t align sales efforts to a broader digital engagement strategy are leaving revenue on the table.
Mirroring other industries, creative and engaging digital marketing is the new norm in HLS. It’s what healthcare professionals expect, and it’s what marketers and salespeople need to deliver. Marketing automation provides tools B2B marketers can use to create content that really resonates with audiences in healthcare and life sciences — while paving new paths for sales teams to connect with clients.
Here are three strategies B2B marketers can use to create digital marketing that engages healthcare professionals:
1. Personalized customer journeys that provide real value to clients.
After generating qualified HLS leads with website forms and landing pages, B2B marketers can use CRM data and marketing automation to target them with personalized content at every touchpoint. This helps address the specific issues faced by each customer in their segment of the healthcare field by delivering messaging tailored to their needs — at any time, through any platform, and on any device.
Email is a particularly important messaging medium when it comes to marketing and sales relationships with HLS clients. It’s where HLS customer journeys typically begin, as well as where they continue to grow. Pardot can dynamically align marketing emails with pain points faced by health practitioners, delivering relevant content to HLS clients throughout their customer journeys.
2. Alignment that makes marketing and sales relationships seamless.
Unfortunately, in many companies, marketing and sales teams are used to operating in disconnected silos. This is as true in the HLS industry as it is in any other. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Today’s digital technology has transformed the marketing and sales industry with innovations such as real-time alerts, customer activity tracking, and ROI Reporting, which provide a unified view into marketing and sales metrics and performance tracking. Now, both marketing and sales teams are able to quantify their impact on driving pipeline and revenue, creating a shared sense of transparency and accountability. These technology advancements drive increased alignment that encourages collaborative selling and business success.
This increased alignment is especially helpful when connecting with clients in healthcare, where agile marketing methodology helps lead to effective sales, and collaboration is key to delivering stellar customer experiences. According to the Salesforce HLS Sector report, high-performing healthcare marketing companies are five times more likely to rate their agility as “excellent,” and four times more likely to rate their collaboration between business units as “excellent.”
3. Intelligent account-based marketing that serves each client’s unique needs.
Together, personalized email campaigns and seamless marketing and sales alignment can be combined with artificial intelligence to create truly compelling account-based marketing. The HLS industry, with its highly specific customer pain points and solutions, is an ideal fit for the specialized care of account-based marketing, which allows B2B marketers to target key audiences at scale and solve their unique problems.
Using account-based marketing for your HLS clients can help set you apart from competitors in a meaningful way. Although many healthcare and life sciences marketers are working to improve customer journeys, many still haven’t perfected personalized 1-to-1 account-based marketing. In the Salesforce Marketing Trends Across HLS report, it’s recorded that only 15-31% of HLS marketers currently produce content that evolves in response to actions taken by leads and customers.
Digital innovation is rapidly evolving the entire HLS industry. B2B healthcare & life sciences marketers have the opportunity to evolve in tandem by creating compelling digital marketing that sets them apart from the competition and truly engages clients.
Continue your HLS marketing journey with these resources:
- Webinar: Pardot for Healthcare: Driving Engagement in Life Sciences.
- Webinar: The Secrets to Effective Lead Nurturing in Life Sciences
- Report: Leading the Customer Experience in the Healthcare and Life Sciences Sector
- Report: Marketing Trends Across Healthcare and Life Sciences
- Blog: Automation Is the Magic Pill in Life Sciences Marketing
- Blog: Three Keys to Successful Physician Referral Management
